Crafting Hell
by fishstic
Summary: Alex thought perhaps that maybe she had done something wrong and being dropped on this planet, where the only people were "villagers" who wouldn't even actually talk to her except to barter, was a punishment. Still, it seemed simple enough: cut down a tree, make some logs, build a house. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out, quite a lot.


She awoke with a start and looked around. This wasn't her bed. This wasn't anything she recognized. Grass, okay that wasn't too bad, but why would she be asleep on grass? It was an unusual place, there didn't seem to be any people around for as far as she could see once she stood up and looked around. She seemed to be on the top of a hill. Not a hill like she was used to though, it wasn't curvy at all. It was strangely square. Everything was really strange here, it was all blocky. A _m I on another planet? Why am I here? Am I being punished? Is this what I get for torrenting video games?_

She wasn't one to question the planet's design though. That much was certain, she wasn't a geologist or a whatever they called the NASA people who studied planets. No, she was just a person. A person inexplicably stuck on a planet. Give or take a few hours she guestimated that it was around nine am. A good time to figure out what the hell it was she was supposed to be doing. Stretching out far in front of her at the foot off the hill was a magnificent savannah. Behind her stretched a forest. It seemed like a really stark contrast to her, but she wasn't sure that she had any frame of reference for that, she'd spent her entire life in a small town where houses gave way to trees on one side and fields on the other. She'd only ever seen savannahs in movies and books before.

She glanced at the savannah one last time before deciding that the trees were the best way to go. Perhaps she could build a house out of the wood if she could figure out how to get to the wood in the first place. She walked around the tree closest to the hill. It seemed hopeless to her.

"How the hell am I supposed to cut down a tree with no axe? It's not like I could punch the tree apart with sheer willpower! Is it?" She shook her head, it wouldn't do to think crazy thoughts like that.

Maybe looking around was a better option than just staring at a single tree. She walked a fair ways along the trees, sticking to the bottom of the hill just so she wouldn't get lost. Right were the hill ended she noticed something peculiar. A chest. At least, she thought it was a chest. It was certainly a box of some kind at least. On each side of the chest box thingy was a torch.

"Who would just leave this out here in the open?" she asked of no one in particular. "There's no one around but me and I know I didn't do it. I hope they don't mind if I look."

She approached the box and accidentally knocked down one of the torches, but to her shock, real shock, it didn't set anything on fire. It just shrank down to half its normal size. "What the hell?"

She reached down and picked it up. It almost looked like a match at this point and she wondered, though she wasn't sure what gave her the thought, if it would fit in her pocket. It did. "I wonder if all of them do it?" They did. When she was done with that, and all four torches were in her pocket she turned to the chest box thing.

On top of the chest box thing was a note. It was taped in all four corners and looked like it had been written on an old typewriter.

 _The contents of this chest for the new arrival: 3 sticks, 3 blocks of oak wood planks, 2 apples, 1 stone pickaxe, 1 wooden axe, and 1 log of acacia wood. Please use these things to help you survive. You'll want to have a shelter of some kind built before nightfall. Sorry I cannot greet you personally, but I have important business to attend to. -Sir. G._

"What the..." she stopped herself from cursing but she didn't even know why. No one was around to hear her. "Who is Sir. G.? And why did he leave this for me? Am I even the new arrival he means?" She frowned but opened the chest and took the contents out anyway. It was less surprising that all the things fit into her pocket perfectly than it had been with the torches, because the torches had done it first.

"Alright, mysteries aside, I have an axe now. Time to cut down some trees," she said, proudly holding up the axe and heading back in the direction she had came from. She honestly had no clue how time passed on this planet, but she assumed it couldn't be more than maybe 11am from the way the sun was positioned in the sky. Strange, even the sun was blocky.

The first thing she did was spend three hours chopping down trees and attempting to discover what she could possibly do with all the raw wood. She knew that 'Sir. G.' had said she would need to have a shelter by the end of the day, but what good would a shelter of logs not planks be? It would probably have a draft. As she was finishing chopping down another tree, much to her frustration the wooden axe splintered and broke apart.

"How the hell," she snapped dropping the splinters to the ground and punching the log in front of her - yet another odd thing about this world, the trees didn't fall down when you cut them, they came apart in blocks, logs that shrank and fit automatically into your pocket. What kind of magic could possibly be controlling all of that? - "Am I supposed to" she punched the log again venting her frustration "cut" another punch "down a tree" three more punches "with no axe?" another two punches and the log snapped down into its smaller form and put itself in her pocket just like all the logs she had cut did.

"What the fuck kind of planet is this?" she yelled, "Where you can fucking punch trees into submission? That's stupid even in video game logic!"

A sheep wandered into her view at that point, perhaps wondering what this stranger was doing clearing out a section of the forest when there was a savannah stretching out for miles just beyond the hill at the north, well what she assumed was north, edge of her artificial clearing. Or maybe it wondered what all the cursing was about.

"Are you lost sheep? Go find your flock, herd, pack, whatever it is a group of sheep is called. They're on the other side of the hill. I'm not taking you there," she said to the sheep as she paced around a moment before sitting down beside the final tree that she was going to clear and pulled some of the wood from her pocket wondering just what the hell she was going to do with it.

She grew tired of staring at the wood hoping an idea would pop into her head and started to put it back in her pocket. A moment of glancing up caused her to notice the strange box like display floating in front of her face. It reminded her of the an inventory screen in a video game or sort of like minesweeper. The thought caused her to furrow her brow, she missed her laptop a lot. Still, there was something odd about this thing, then she realized what it was. At the bottom was everything that she had at the top of her pocket, nine slots representing the, she assumed, four things that fit in the top pockets and the one in her hand. Though she wondered where the items in the other 27 slots would be stored. She stared at this for a while, it was opaque. She couldn't see anything behind it, which was fine by her, it wasn't like there was anything there to see but grass.

In the upper right of the thingy, she really needed a better word than thingy, perhaps she should call it her inventory. In the upper right of the inventory she saw a 2x2 grid labeled crafting. "That has to be how I make things," she said to herself, not like there was anyone else she could be talking to.

On the bottom she saw that the wood in her hand was represented on the inventory by a small drawing of itself, surrounded by a gold colored square opposed to the gray ones that surrounded the other, empty squares. _This is simple enough_ , she thought taking one of the wood and moving it up to the 'crafting' section of the inventory.

This was when she noticed that the sky was beginning to darken. She'd cleared out a large area for her house and had plenty of wood logs, somehow she needed to build a house, and fast before it got dark. She was certain of that.

"Alright, time to get cracking," she said. "According to this, one log make four blocks of planks." She moved the planks into one of the blank spots in her inventory and then brought more of the logs up to make more wood once she had a full stack of planks she stopped and thought that she should see what else she could make. One plank block she brought up. "That makes a button? I don't need a button." She brought up another and put it beside it. "I don't need a pressure plate either." Moving the block to be on top instead of beside yielded sticks, nice to know but she wasn't sure she needed four more sticks right now. she brought another block up and when that yielded nothing in either the top or bottom slot, added one more. This had the interesting result of making a crafting table.

"I don't know how that'll be different, but I'll take it," she said moving it to her inventory. She put the planks into the bottom of her inventory which she hoped meant they were in her pocket and then stood up, causing the inventory to go away, leaving her holding what looked like a single block of wood planks but she knew was a stack of sixty-four of them.

"I should start on the house. I'll make it small since it's getting dark," she said, again to herself, or maybe to the sheep who was still hanging around. In the center of the clearing she placed down wood planks in a square with outer dimensions of six planks, by six planks. Then she stacked another plank on top of those. When she realized that that made the walls about two meters tall, compared to her height of about a meter and a half tall, she placed a block at the bottom of the wall and stood on it to add the blocks she would use to make the roof. Just as the sun was finally setting and the moon was rising she finished the roof and put out a torch to light up her little hut.

"What will tomorrow bring I wonder?" she mused as she curled up on the floor, well ground, and tried to get some sleep.

She hadn't even gotten to sleep when about twenty minutes later the sheep was bumping against the wall of her little hut going "BAA BAA" really loudly.

She sighed and punched out two blocks to make a door for the sheep. "Come in then pesky thing. You can stay here for the night if you promise to sleep. The sheep bleated gratefully and moved inside of the hut. Once she saw what was out there in the dark, she quickly put the bottom block back then looked for a moment longer before gasping, "ZOMBIES!" and quickly replacing the top block too.

"There's zombies out there!" she hissed at the sheep. The sheep just bleated knowingly and laid down next to one of the walls.

"Yeah, I'm not surprised that doesn't faze you," she said. "You've lived her your whole life. My name's Alex. Is it alright if I call you Fleecy?" The sheep blinked at her and bleated happily. "Okay, Fleecy it is. I guess you'll be my pet sheep now."

Fleecy laid their head down and closed their eyes. Alex considered her options for a moment then said, "Fleecy, can I use you as a pillow?" Fleecy bleated quietly and noncommittally. "I'll take that as a yes." She crossed the hut and laid down perpendicular to Fleecy with her head on their wool. "Good night, Fleecy."


End file.
